Scarecrow
by Intezil
Summary: For John's sake. A sadder tale than my usual fare.


It had taken all of her reasoning, pleading, threatening, and finally begging to convince John not to follow the liquid metal thing in the form of Catherine Weaver on a reckless chase in pursuit of Cameron's chip. Weaver seemed disappointed with his choice, but left through the time displacement field alone. Only in retrospect would she realize that it was the last thing she would ever be able to make John do. This was not out of resentment, though she was certain that John resented her for this and a hundred other things, but a more fundamental shift in their relationship; convincing John to abandon Cameron had required Sarah to cash in every bit of credit she had with her son. He was still her son and still loved her, but she would never be able to compel his obedience again.

John spent hour after hour repairing Cameron's body, rarely stopping to eat or sleep. Sarah assumed that he hoped she would somehow find her way back, but she doubted her son would ever see the machine again as she was. However, she was not able to tell John that, and knew he was not ready to hear it, so Ellison counseled her to let John work through the loss in his own way. She was not willing to name what John felt for his former protector, but for her part, alternated between hating Cameron for whatever foolish idea had motivated her to leave John, and being willing to sacrifice anything to be able to give her chip back to John, so he could have his...friend back, and she could have her son back.

Sometimes he would try and explain what he was working on, but Sarah's technical mind ended at guns and car engines, and Terminators were far more complicated than that. She nearly shrieked in horror when she entered the room of their new safehouse he'd appropriated as a workshop, and saw pieces of Cameron- arms, legs, torso, her head, and unidentifiable mechanical bits laid out around the room. For a moment she thought John had smashed it to pieces in a fit of anguish, but realized almost immediately that the pieces were neatly separated and organized. Finding her voice, she asked him what he was doing.

He waved at the pieces dismissively, without even looking up from the piece he was working on, "I needed to examine some of the internals, and they're easier to get at this way."

"So you...took her apart?" Sarah felt foolish at the horror she heard in her own voice, reminding herself that Cameron was just a machine, but she had to admit that the ghoulishness of the situation disturbed her.

John's casual answer did nothing to relieve her anxiety, "Yeah, it's actually not that difficult, once you figure out how the different components are connected. The worst part is cutting away the skin around the piece you want to remove." Sarah looked at the pieces and realized that the damage to Cameron's skin she'd seen had repaired itself. Even the lost eye had grown back somehow, it and its twin staring blankly at her. She tried not to feel accusation in that stare. The only damage now were fresh cuts, crudely but efficiently made by John with a scalpel, at the points where the metal components would connect with each other.

She realized that John was barely paying attention to the conversation, all of his focus directed at whatever thing- Sarah didn't recognize the piece- he was working on.

A few days later, Sarah went into the workshop, intent on getting John to eat something, to find Cameron's body once again reassembled. Except for the open chip port she appeared to be a normal sleeping teenage girl. From the port, ran several cords, connected to John's laptop. John frowned at the screen for several seconds, ignoring her, before grinning and typing furiously. Sarah frowned. When John was just repairing Cameron's body, she had left him alone, but it was apparently completely repaired, and this was something else. What was John doing?

John seemed to notice her presence, and looked up at her, a genuine smile on his face. "Have you ever wondered about Cromartie?" John asked.

Sarah's face betrayed her confusion, "You mean Weaver's Turk? 'John Henry'?"

He shook his head, "No, Cromartie. Back in the bank vault, with that plasma gun. You blew his head off. I saw it bounce like a basketball."

Sarah nodded. She was pretty sure she remembed that too, but she had no idea what John was talking about.

"So did you ever stop to wonder how he put himself back together? I don't think Skynet has a policy with Geico."

She stuttered, confused, "I...guess..."

John continued as if she weren't there, and he was merely laying out ideas in his head, "Did you know that there are people, for whatever medical reasons, who've had chunks of their brain as big as your fist removed? And they're still able to...function. I mean, they aren't as capable as they once were, but they still...live."

Horror-struck, Sarah realized what John meant to do, "You're not just repairing her body. You're trying to...make her work again."

John looked at her stubbornly, "Cromartie's body had to be able to function without a head, much less without a chip, in order for him to repair himself."

Sarah felt her heart break for her son, "John, even if you can make her body work without the chip, it won't be...it won't be her."

His face darkened with anger and frustration, "I know that mom. I can't get her code that was on the chip back, and I can't replace it, and even if I could, I can't make a new chip to put it on. I don't have the skill or the technology," but Sarah heard what went unspoken in his frustration- he had already tried and failed, "but we don't know how much of her was on the chip. We know it was some of her," John slumped sadly, "probably most of her, but if there's even a chance that some part of her is still in that body, on a secondary processor or something, I have to find it. I owe her that."

Sarah looked at him skeptically, but wasn't yet ready to crush his hopes, "Is that even...possible?"

He nodded, "I've taken her apart and I know as much as there is to know about her construction," except, Sarah thought, for the piece he needed, the one which would make this conversation moot. "Her entire body is full of circuits, ROM and RAM chips, I/O nodes..." He saw that he was beginning to lose Sarah's understanding and smirked, "Yes. Yes, it's possible." Sarah took his attentiveness as a good sign, that her son was coming back to the world. For that reason alone, she did not object to his project.

Two more days, and he was ready for the first test. Ellison thought the wires running from John's computer to Cameron's chip port reminded him of the wire connecting the Turk/John Henry to the body of the Terminator that once called itself Cromartie.

John hit a sequence of keys and very slowly, Cameron powered up, her eyes slowly opening and focusing, but she continued standing motionless like a statue.

"Hey Cam," John whispered with a smile, "Can you hear me?"

"Affirmative," she replied in monotone.

He grinned in success, "Do you know who I am?"

Her eyes moved to focus on his face. After a moment, she responded, "Negative."

"It's John."

She tilted her head in the manner familiar to both John and Sarah, "John Connor?"

"Ye-". Sarah saw it in her mind a split second before it actually happened. Cameron's hands lashed out like serpents and wrapped themselves around John's throat, attempting to choke the life out of him. Sarah put her shotgun to Cameron's head and pulled the trigger, blasting the machine away from him, only a moment before Ellison fired the taser John had told him to have ready in case something like this happened.

Coughing and massaging his throat, John growled an angry reprimand at her. Far from grateful for her intervention, he saw only the damage she had done that he would now need to spend time and effort repairing. "I didn't need you to shoot her. That's why Ellison had the taser."

"You knew she might try to kill you, and you still went ahead with this?" Sarah asked in angry disbelief.

"No", John answered quietly, "I knew she would probably try to kill me. I needed a live test to identify any surprises Skynet left in her. Now I can remove them. The next test will go better."

Sarah turned and left the room without a word.

The next test, four days later, was uneventful if not better. It turned out that 'John Connor?' would be the last words they would hear her speak. With Skynet's malevolent code removed, it seemed any vestiges of Cameron's intelligence had gone with it. Once activated, she simply stared into space. John was able to get her to walk across the room with him, and sit on the couch, but that seemed to be the limit of her capabilities.

John cared for her as best he could, cleaning her, dressing her in clothes Cameron would have liked, feeding her. Since Cameron had always eaten very little, he could only guess how much food she needed. When he thought she had eaten about enough, he would ask her if she wanted any more, but he was met only with an uncomprehending stare. Sarah avoided her, unable to watch her son's heartbreaking devotion. Ellison attempted to be courteous to her, greeting her when he saw her, but soon ceased when his efforts failed to produce any acknowledgement. Savannah did her best to help John take care of Cameron, brushing her hair, picking out clothes for her, painting her fingernails and toenails. Ellison wondered if she saw something he and Sarah had missed. Sarah thought she just saw a life-sized doll she could play with. Still, Savannah was able to coax more from her than Sarah or Ellison could, as Savannah could often convince Cameron to turn her head to make it easier to brush her hair, or to walk from one place to another, or to carry something. John had slightly better results, in that he could usually get Cameron to do anything her limited mind could understand, which wasn't very much. She seemed to regard Sarah and Ellison as obstacles to be avoided when John or Savannah walked her through the house rather than as people.

On a good day, she was an idiot pet that followed John around the house and attempted to please him but was unable to understand most of the world around her.

On a bad day, she would stare mindlessly at walls for hours at a time.

About a month and a half after her repair, something in Sarah had snapped. She decided that she needed to get rid of it, for John's sake. Her plan wasn't very well thought out. John and Ellison were out shopping. She managed to manhandle Cameron to the driveway, before finding herself completely unable to get her into the truck. Her broken mind made it easy to forget that Cameron's body was still vastly stronger than any human, and without her cooperation there was no way to get her into the vehicle. She tried asking her, she tried commanding her, she tried shoving her, but Cameron refused to budge. Idly, Sarah wondered whether she sensed what Sarah intended on some level, and this was a deeply buried twinge of self-preservation, or whether she was being uncooperative because Sarah was not John, or if she simply really couldn't understand what Sarah wanted her to do. She considered fetching Savannah, to see if she could cajole Cameron into the truck, but that would require spinning a lie that would convince Savannah her intentions were honorable. Before she could come up with a plan of action, John and Ellison had returned. It took only a moment for John to take in the scene and deduce what she had been doing, and his face clenched in a terrible outrage. Sarah shrank back from the motionless cyborg like a caught thief.

Sarah, despite all her efforts and sacrifices, had never considered herself a good mother to John. Not really. She had yelled and cursed and hit him too many times for that. Driven by fear and desperation, she had told herself it had been necessary, but she had still hated herself for it. But this was the first time she had ever been afraid of her son instead of being afraid for him. This was the first time he had ever hit her. Crying tears of shame and fear, she promised him she would never do it again.

Sometimes, there are moments of semi-intelligence. John sits on the couch, holding her in his arms, stroking her hands in his. Timidly, she reaches out and strokes his arm. No one can say whether it was an act of will, or simple mechanical imitation.

Once, while John is sleeping, she gets up and walks to Sarah's room, she silently forces Sarah into John's room, then stares intently at him. It takes Sarah several moments to understand what Cameron wants. Despite the fact that she has seen him sleeping dozens of times since her reactivation, she has taken the idea that there is something wrong with him, and wants Sarah to fix it. Sarah hopelessly attempts to explain to her that he's only sleeping, but gives up when she realizes that Cameron isn't even paying attention to her. She starts to leave, but Cameron force-fully grabs her arm, holding her in place. She has no choice but to wake John up, who proceeds to sit with Cameron the rest of the night. When he falls asleep again at six a.m., she no longer seems concerned.

It is a bad day. John and Cameron are outside. He tells her to wait while he goes into the house to get something from his bedroom. In exhaustion, he falls asleep on his bed. He is woken by thunder, and he momentarily panics when he doesn't know where she is, but he soon finds her outside in the yard where he had told her to wait. She is soaking wet, having stood in the rain for over an hour. He brings her into the house, apologizing with tears in his eyes as he dries her with a towel. She does not understand what he is upset about.

Judgment day has come and gone and no bombs have fallen. Sarah and Ellison argue about what it means, if John Henry was Skynet after all, now lost in some unknown future, or perhaps someone at Kaliba had spilled coffee on the one they were building. Sarah, John, and Ellison laugh at that. A true and honest laugh. Skynet, the digital demon that had haunted their nightmares, ruined and ended so many lives, defeated once and for all by a cup of Folger's Columbian Roast. Sarah is too wise and too suspicious to believe that it is truly over, but she will hope.

It is a good day. It is John's birthday. There is a chocolate cake. John insists on letting Cameron cut her own piece. He puts the knife in her hand. She looks at it as if she doesn't know what it is. For a moment Sarah has a terrible vision of her plunging the knife into John's neck, but instead she makes a single cut into the cake and then looks to John for approval. He smiles at her and helps her finish cutting a piece.

Sarah wakes up one night to the sound of John vomiting. She finds him in the bathroom, crying and retching. She is about to ask him if he is sick, when she catches a glimpse through John's partially open bedroom door, and she understands what has taken place. Cameron is lying on the bed staring vacantly at the ceiling. She is naked. Sarah goes into her room and closes the door. She weeps for her son.

A few weeks later, under the tongue-loosening of alcohol, John admits to his mother that he's not sure the cyborg should even be called Cameron anymore, or if he's made a new broken creature out of Cameron's corpse.

Sarah wonders sometimes why she allows it, how he could ever become a great leader if Judgment Day does come, when he is responsible for a helpless invalid. It is those times that Sarah has to remind herself what Cameron is, and that John's attentive devotion to her is an indulgence on his part, the only way he has of being with the...thing he loves. Sarah knows that if he were to tell Cameron to wait in a closet, and leave her there for six months, she would be perfectly fine when he got back to her.

John hunts endlessly for any glimmers of intelligence from her, motivated by the belief that some part of Cameron is still lost within her, if he can only find a way to reach it and bring it out. Sarah remembers its hands around his neck, and hopes he's wrong.


End file.
